Author of two book-length narrative poems, THE ADVENTURE and HAPPINESS, both published by Story Line Press. Other poems in print and online journals. Adjunct professor creative writing George Washington University.

Signor B.

I am condemned to interview my nightmares;to maintain a correct, mildly supplicant poseas long as the tape is running. By now I should myself be interviewed,throwing out misdirections, obiter dicta,apothegms, charm. Being solid, meaning something,which I could then evade, deny, and mock.My only consolation is that whileI ask the questions I am safe from the answers,enjoying a privileged, tourist statusin a world of contempt I subtly enfold in my own.

As now, beneath an awningon a street of awnings and tables,where diminutive cars jockeyaround an enormous fountain with gods and nymphs,and the driver of a scooter leans and snagsa purse from a shoulder, then speeds professionally off,and the waiter sets down my subject’sPernod and Pellegrino and, more sloppily, mine.Immaculate and formal in this heat,unable to choose amongthe venom, condescension, and detachmentmy interviewees adopt, Signor B.employs the third of these, describinghis bombing of a train station in the Seventies;the second when, inevitably,I ask about innocent lives. “No one is innocent,”he says. “The point of terroris that it proclaims a new Law, even a new calendar.People will live henceforth by its demandsor join those who were killed as an example.”He admits to a certain ambivalenceabout suicide bombers. “On the one hand,courage, of course, commitment;on the other, they are after all – ” (he grins affably) “Semites.Hysterics. Some of my friendshave found in Islam a spiritual homeand political point d’appui; I resist this option.” “The virgins don’t attract you,” I say. He shrugs:“Narcissism … a typical(if I may say so) confusionof private and collective salvation.The new world is not merely builtupon the ruins of the old, it is those ruins,which those who made should rule. My ownfew years in prison were an inconvenience, not a martyrdom.” I ask what his guiding principle and that of his like-minded friends is now.He reminisces about the Master,whose name he will not allow me to use;to whom he was privileged to listen,as a young man, in the shadow of heavy drapes,among the Tantric charts and the sculptures of gods.Who spoke of the beauty and focus,the seriousness (“so unlike us”) of the SS.And of that one Tradition,that Knowledge of a higher realm no single creed has fully grasped but which,when the Jewish god and his epigonesare deposed, will again bringthe gifts of caste and of obedience.“Democracy,” he says, “which … people like you believe is a motor, is only wheels and seats;the motor, such as it was, is running down.”

But by now he is too, an old manfanning himself, satisfiedto sit and sip, and talk, even to me;wondering to some slight extent, perhaps,what lies behind my impassive gaze. We turnto art. He seems surprisedthat I know his Master, Evola (I say the name), began as a Dadaistpainter. “He renounced that decadence. Of course,” he adds, “you won’t accept that term.”I say, “I think the visual artscan do as they like. I’m more concernedwith literature. Which loses, I think, when it assumesthat words are just a picture, not a window.”

“Upon the Ideal,” he nods.

“On whatever arc of history,”I say, turning off the tape,“we can perceive through it.”

He smiles and, to my outrage, quotes:“Whatever can be believed is an image of truth.”

The Bourgeois

This was the second sighting.The first was in spring,in the brush at the edge of the woods, which is also the edge of our lawn.I was out, bleary,with coffee, and he was there. -Constant alertnessis not fear: it leaves timefor a considered starethat changed to an alarming yawn.The neighbor's dachshund yapped, and he was gone.

Today the leaves remaining uplooked deader than those fallen.In the hills over the river,cars are visible again -those two lanes, their self-canceling motion.He in the same spot,his coat the color of the finest leaf.

His range must consist ofa few square kilometersbounded by roads, the bike path, the river, houses.Somewhere he brings downa snake, or one of the moles that destroy our gardens. Bears the meat in his jaws to his mate and pupin a hole downslope,and they greet his return with joy.

Burbs

1

This stretch of pavement is seldom walked.Shadow of the toweracross the street.No parking. Drivewayof a minor bank, windowless wallof an old brick fourplex;and an untended tree,thin knotted branches downto the curb. One enters,bowed, a tunnelwhere light and strideare interrupted.Sparse runty leaves,a soot- and earth-grimed sap deepenon the sidewalk. Rarely, a fruit: dark plum and pit,inedible no doubt.Even a place so voidbrings something forth.

2

Half-Asian. At the crosswalk,small lips tighten, a hand makesa cell-phone-flipping gesture(but was there a phone?). In this assaultive heat and light (why no shades?), the sweep of her chest shines, the low dark blouse inevitably soaking. Quickly,whatever annoyance it was leaves her neck, and her eyes;in which, well-invested somewhere,is amusement.Perhaps at incidental, brief, hopefully not unpleasant experiences, like thatof the man looking.

Late Landscape

What it means, the ruinoccluded by low trees,is a desire to be left alone.The trees, airless and dense,a growth in darkness carried outunder cover of day.That path, which no one ever walked,is mystery; the prevailing tone –last green before brown –has unilaterally declared itselfbeauty.

M A L L M O N U M E N T S

World War II

Descending among thousands fromhundreds of buses, he hasit together enough notto stumble. Medshave also steadiedhis sight and stilled his trembling jowls,but not that unaccountable cold thingstill chasing back and forth(as once in battle, then in offices)while Taps is played, and heand other former soldiers weep and sing.What does it remind him ofat last? A rat a buddy on Peleliu kept as a pet.He reads the inscriptions, the sortof statements officials meanto be engraved in stone; now they have been. His strangefamiliar, having scrapedits fur against the monolith markedATLANTIC, hurls itselfat the other. The President (whomthis vet supposes he admires) speaks. – One night a Jap mortardid for his buddy and the rat escaped.

Korea

As you approach from the northwest,one gestures caution, thereby welcomingyou to the patrol. The scrubthrough which he and the others walkabstracts itself in alternating rowsto granite. Blackin the rain that, most days,though you know it’s cold and solid, you can’t feel.He isn’t looking at youexactly; he’s eight feet tall(though bent beneath his rifle, poncho, pack),as if men’s bones engorged themselves in fearand weariness blanched everything they bear.Few of them look at each other –the radioman, the BARman – but the squad is a man(accompanied by other ghosts than you),intently seekingnot freedom, which is not free, but what is his.

Vietnam

Perhaps now he can stand and lookat a wall, not sitagainst one as he did for twenty yearsin his own stink,insulting every passerbyfor being clearly neither friend nor gook.And stare until the names becomesentences defininghis faint reflection;the letters, flowers, photos, teddy-bearsleft daily in the holy gutter –warehouses full of them –gifts to and from him.Then try, like other missing souls,to join the bronze three-man patrol,or kneel by the nurses –one cradling a head he knew,one gazing upward for a helicopter.

Lincoln

Possibly intelligenceeverywhere in the universe is statues.(Not all of them; God knowshow many are to beings who made,not freed, slaves.) They actin other ways than those who build them:slower. Talk among themselves;translate and criticize each other’s prose,if any. – Helpfulto have it in the corner of your gaze,as here. Somebody many galaxiesaway is praisingboth Gettysburg and the Second Inaugural:“Nice how you structure it in layers.‘First we were here,then did this, then discovered that;now we must learn.’ Both Law and Story.”With his familiaramused and melancholy turnof thought, our man says,“They came together for me in that partabout ‘the blood drawn by the lashpaid by the sword’ … and are still yoked, I gather.”At which, unnoticed by those marble eyes,afternoon lightreaches them from our meager sun.

The Reflecting Pool

Late tourists wonder whether theyapproach their car or drift away;or weigh one sight and trinket moreagainst being tagged and towed at four.The frisbees and the kites descend. A lawyer ponders, presses Send,shuts his laptop, leaves the bench,while schizophrenic fingers clenchtheir shopping cart and police appearto get that garbage out of here.Somebody’s limo passes; soonthis pool will only mirror the moon.Carefully tended and reseeded,the greensward remains piebald, kneadedtoo deeply by the feet of thosewho massed this year, e.g., to closeabortion clinics – mimickingthe rhetoric of Dr. King.Which, though it still has power to move,cannot be said thereby to provethe universe has a moral arcor bends towards anything but dark.